


Guide Dog

by cognomen



Series: Cognomen's List of Things that Aren't Snakes [4]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Casual Sex, F/M, M/M, Vaguely before crisis-ish timeframe, command as a kink, implied womanizing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 19:03:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17689112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: Rufus thinks he’s clever with his request.  It’s within his rights to ask; within Tseng’s duties to oblige.“She could be dangerous,” Rufus warns, by way of excuse as Tseng stands beside him in the elevator.February Ficlet Challenge, Day 4 - Blind Date





	Guide Dog

Rufus thinks he’s clever with his request.  It’s within his rights to ask; within Tseng’s duties to oblige.

“She could be dangerous,” Rufus warns, by way of excuse as Tseng stands beside him in the elevator.

 _Impossible to be more dangerous than you,_ Tseng thinks. One thing the boy forgets is that Tseng’s been playing power games since Rufus was stirring up trouble in boarding school. He knows the breadth and scope of them, and knows the feel of the bit and bridle both to guide and to lead with a firm hand. Rufus thinks he’s being clever; Tseng taught him to be clever in the first place.

One thing Tseng sometimes— _sometimes_ , just enough to have hope for the future of the company—forgets is that Rufus is a boy. He has a man’s age and a man’s power wound around his fist since the days when it could grasp his silver spoon  in chubby fingers, wave it, and command men who were afraid of his father to pick his crumbs up off the floor.

Never once the Turks. After all, they’re the reason people fear ShinRa. There aren’t too many people who look at a man with a leash and fail to consider the dog.

“I’ll be on my guard,” Tseng says, though it’s not a promise.

Rufus meets the woman—socialite class, upper plate restaurant, designer dress. Tseng has one look at her clutch, too small for money let alone a weapon or materia. She’s the least dangerous person in the room.

He stands there through the whole dinner anyway, watching Rufus work. Rufus has been raised in the shark tank, and he knows how to glide through the water. Tseng is here to make a point; provide an illusion. Demonstrate power. The giggling girl sees an older man held in place by a duty to Rufus’ person.

It’s a show for Tseng, too. A little flexion of power, to remind him what he owes Rufus. He sees the way Rufus’ eyes slide toward him in the instants she won’t notice. _Are you watching? You’re here because I told you to be, and you’ll stand there all night because I want you to._

Tseng draws the line at the hotel room door, while Rufus is too distracted to correct him. Rufus and the girl go pawing and sliding inside, with false claims and kisses spilling over.

“—not usually like this, Mr. ShinRa, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—”

“You can call me Rufus.”

And she will. Long after he forgets her name and the night fades into a string of nights just like it.

Tseng stations himself outside the door and the black suit and severe stillness of his attitude tells enough about who he is and what business he’s on that no one bothers him. The few people that pass by skirt around him to the other side of the hall.

In the small hours, Rufus emerges in his shirtsleeves, cuffs pushed up to his elbows and his hair an indulgent wreck. He leans in the doorway, looking flushed and satisfied. Not undone; Tseng gets to keep some things for himself.

“Got a smoke?” Rufus asks.

Tseng unearths a pack from his inner pocket. Red package with gold letters in Wutaiian. Rufus wrinkles his nose and takes one anyway, yanks the lighter out of the pack, too. Tseng refuses to indulge on duty, holds any outward reaction that would betray his internal yearning as Rufus lights up and fills the hall with the herby, earthen scent.

“These are gross,” Rufus says, like he says every time. He passes the pack back to Tseng, but keeps the lighter. Tseng has another one in the bottom of his pocket; Rufus keeps his nearly every time. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“I want plausible deniability when your father asks me where I was while you were siring his bastard grandchild,” Tseng answers. He keeps his eyes on the ugly hotel wallpaper, repeating patterns that look vaguely like the character for a swear in bad handwriting.

“He speaks,” Rufus says, leaning indolently in the doorway and exhaling smoke. “I’ve registered your complaint and learned from the old man’s mistakes. Are you really going to stand out here all night?”

“Doesn’t that prove what you want it to?”

Rufus just looks at him, through the cloud of his own making, and then smiles slowly. “It proves you’re stubborn, and that’s a weakness I really like to bend men over.”

There’s no safe answer that’s true, so Tseng doesn’t give one. He stands quiet and Rufus watches with flint-hard blue eyes. His father’s eyes in his mother’s features, far more calculating than either of them had ever been. Summing Tseng up like a math problem he’s trying to find a variable in.

“Well, if your little resistance lets you keep your pride,” Rufus drops the cigarette butt onto the hotel carpet. He reaches out for Tseng’s ponytail and yanks until Tseng allows himself to unfold from his perfect balance—more to humor Rufus than because Rufus has overpowered him. Tseng wouldn’t have kept his hair if it was a disadvantage, even before he’d ever come to Midgar.

Rufus kisses him and his mouth tastes like Tseng’s brand of cigarettes and some stranger’s sex and Tseng indulges the brief fantasy of holding Rufus down somewhere private and demonstrating the difference between influential power and physical power, but Rufus would enjoy it too much.

“Goodnight, Tseng,” Rufus says, and leaves Tseng to break his own resolution, smoking in the hall until some nervous bellhop brings him an ashtray from the lobby.

-

**Author's Note:**

> I guess if it's a blind date you'd need a seeing eye dog right? I don't know the title for this one gave me fits please enjoy this bad pun in place of a proper title.


End file.
